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Yandex Metrica’s hidden power

If so, you are probably part of the 70% of users who chose to entrust their data to Google Analytics. However, did you take the time to compare the different tools available on the market?

If we set aside powerful paid solutions such as Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics Premium, AT Internet or even Mixpanel, we’ll discover a multitude of free high-performance solutions on the market. You may have already tested tools such as Matomo, Clicky or Kissmetrics. But have you heard of Yandex Metrica?

Getting Started with Yandex Metrica

Yandex is a Russian multinational corporation founded in 1997. Its first product Yandex.ru was a search engine. After successive developments, a complete suite was built. It now includes an email service, a browser, translation tools, storage, and calendars among others, just like what Google offers. In Russia, the service is extremely popular, as well as in some of its neighboring countries such as Turkey, Ukraine, Belarus or Kazakhstan. Its search engine service represents 53% of the market share in Russia ahead of Google (43%).

In 2010, Yandex acquired WebVisor, which gradually became Metrica. In 2014, Yandex Metrica released Version 2.0, offering extremely broad analysis and reporting capabilities.

Installing Yandex Metrica is very simple. Like Google Analytics, you just need to paste a tracking code in the header or body of your site. The code can be customized, depending on the features you wish to activate (click maps, user videos). At startup, you land on the dashboard by default (in English, like the rest of the platform), with simple metrics, such as the number of visitors, the traffic sources, the bounce rate and the most viewed pages.

For Google Analytics users, the first impression is readability. One of the strengths of Yandex Metrica is its ease of use, even for novice users.

Yandex Metrica’s advanced features

Metrica offers nine pre-configured reports that track the most common KPIs, from site traffic to monetization, to visitor data.

But the real power of Yandex Metrica lies in the other tools offered by the service. In fact, the ‘Map’ feature provides access to four types of reports:
- Link map: indicates the most clicked links on the page;
- Click map: indicates the clicks recorded on the page (on links and non-clickable elements);
- Scroll map: indicates the areas on the page that receive the most attention from visitors;
- Form analysis: indicates how users interact with forms.

In addition, the ‘Session Replay’ tool allows you to view user sessions. It helps to understand how visitors navigate throughout your website, search for information, and leave your site.

The visits are, of course, completely anonymous as no IP address is shared and personal information that is entered into form fields is hidden. Furthermore, Yandex Metrica is fully compliant with the GDPR. You simply need to select the “do not store the IP addresses of users” option.

Why use Yandex Metrica?

Lastly, it should be noted that Yandex Metrica offers unsampled data. What’s more, the platform is free and does not have a premium version. All users can take full advantage of all the tool has to offer.

Yandex Metrica can, of course, track websites in all languages. However, if your site is in Russian, then this tool is definitely vital to have. It will, for example, give you access to the keywords used in both SEO and PPC, whereas Google only gives you access to some of these keywords. In addition, if you use Yandex.Direct for your paid ads, Yandex Metrica will give you access to data conversion.

Furthermore, Yandex Metrica may be used along with Google Analytics or any other analytics tool, offering it numerous supplementary reports. The usage of two tools also allows you to have a benchmark to identify potential problems on each platform.

If you wish to use Yandex Metrica’s powers to discover new insights on your website, Datawords can assist you in its deployment as well as in the tool’s configuration and the analysis of your data to give you concrete advice on how to develop your business.